As the size of the Internet grows larger and larger, problems associated with routing information from one location to another get more and more complex. For example, each time a new node is added to the Internet, so-called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routers must modify their stored routing tables. In addition, if one BGP router elects to select a new path to route information, this change has a cascading effect on its surrounding neighbors (e.g., other BGP routers), requiring them to also update their routing tables. Until every affected BGP router has so updated its forwarding tables, it may be difficult to route information through a so-affected BGP router. When all of the so-affected BGP routers have completed their updates, the network is said to have “converged.”
The greater the number of changes to the Internet, the longer it takes a network to converge. It is expected that as the Internet grows, the problem of convergence, i.e., the length of time it takes a network to converge, will grow larger and larger.
The growth of the Internet is also the cause of a related problem. As the number of nodes in the Internet grows larger and larger, the number of routing-related messages, and the length of each message, needed to be exchanged between two given routers grows larger and larger as well. That is, because conventional Internet addresses do not contain information about the geographic location of a given node, BGP routers must exchange messages to compute routing paths. As the Internet gets larger and larger, without geographical information routers will have to exchange an increasing number of routing messages and each message will have to contain an increasing amount of routing information to be able to compute routing paths.
In sum, it can be said that the existing methods of computing routes or paths are not easily “scalable”; that is, though it may work for a certain size network, it may not work very well at all for a very large network.
In contrast, conventional telephony networks have not encountered such problems, in part, due to their use of a protocol known as Signaling System 7 (SS7). SS7 has proven to be very robust and scalable. One aspect of SS7 which allows it to be scalable is the fact that the address (e.g., telephone number) of a given node represents encoded geographical information. This allows routing paths to be computed based on the telephone numbers themselves rather than based on the exchange of routing messages.
It is, therefore, desirable to provide for methods and devices which allow for highly scalable Internet routing akin to SS7.
It is further desirable to provide for methods and devices that allow highly scalable Internet routing by encoding geographical-like routing information within an Internet address.